Like many of you, I had signed petitions and called and wrote letters urging justice in the case of the murder of Mark MacPhail. I believed that justice could in no way be served by executing Troy Davis.

I’ve spent most of my life in Georgia, and I had some belief that, somewhere along the line, politicians at some level would stop this execution. I was working the night of the execution, so I did not attend the vigil in Augusta, my home town.

Almost immediately, I had a physical reaction from this stress. I slept despite the headache, but awoke early this morning.

And I awoke angry and frustrated.

I usually hate the positive-thinking types who represent themselves as “civic boosters” when they really just want to get their hands in the city coffers. But the theory is correct. Religion is correct in that regard. We must have faith to keep from destroying ourselves. We have to get up and do something good, even if we just want to lie in a dark room and not do anything.

May God have mercy on Mark MacPhail and Troy Davis. May God grant both families patients to endure their losses. May God bring some measure of justice in this case by making its truth clear in this world. I believe that justice will be done in the next world, both to the murderer of Officer MacPhail and to those politicians and officials who push executions as a means of claiming some misguided notion of police loyalty and a means of gaining votes. And all of you who applaud this pro-death penalty politicians should reconsider your ways as well.

That is because on March 30 of this year, Brisenia, who was nine years old at the time, was murdered in her home by armed members of a right-wing paramilitary group. Right-wing militias, deaths squads and other paramilitary organizations were relatively common in Latin America during the tumultuous 1980s, and their horrendous crimes and history of cruel human rights abuses are well known and have been extensively documented by human rights groups. What makes Brisenia’s murder different isn’t just that the crime ocurred more recently, but that it ocurred on American soil, and that the violent paramilitary organization that murdered her while she recoiled and wept, pleading for her life, was an American terrorist organization known as the Minutemen American Defense organization, a group whose founder, Shawna Forde, has well established ties to larger and better known anti-immigrant groups such as the Minutemen and FAIR, the Federation For American Immigration Reform (Forde once claimed to be a spokesperson for FAIR on television, though that group denies she was a member).